


Puddles

by beetlesacquired



Category: Original Work
Genre: Short Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-09
Updated: 2018-11-09
Packaged: 2019-08-20 22:41:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16564490
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beetlesacquired/pseuds/beetlesacquired
Summary: There was a little girl on the sidewalk.  She sat on the concrete, rain running down her face like tears and dripping from her hair.  Her small hands dipped into a puddle, drawing patterns that kept getting interrupted by heavy drops before they could form proper waves.





	Puddles

**Author's Note:**

> I listened to this while writing:  
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK3yLsyK1AM

There was a little girl on the sidewalk. She sat on the concrete, rain running down her face like tears and dripping from her hair. Her small hands dipped into a puddle, drawing patterns that kept getting interrupted by heavy drops before they could form proper waves.

I had been running when I saw her, taking advantage of the reprieve from the summer heat to get some exercise in. I slowed my pace when I first saw the small figure, and I stopped right in front of her. She didn’t look up as I pulled my earbuds out of my ears.

The clothes she wore were the same type of ill-fitting and stained clothes I had been dressed in when my mother sent me out to play. They were the ones that no one but your closest family and the neighborhood kids, who were wearing the same things, were supposed to see you in. Remembering the days that my mother came home late from work, and I snuck out to play in the rain, I felt a kinship to her. She could’ve easily been me, or one of my sisters, or one of my friends.

I crouched down in front of her, and finally, she looked up, large, brown, childlike eyes staring at me like I was something new and amazing and magical. Because that was the way children looked at things and people; all they saw was possibilities. I smiled at her. “What are you doing out here?” I asked, putting a hand on the wet sidewalk to keep from teetering on my heels. She shrugged. I glanced up at the house she was sat in front of, noting the two cars in the driveway. “Is that where you live?” A nod. “Do your parents know you’re out here?” A head-shake this time. “You should go back inside,” I suggested gently. “They’re probably worried about you if they don’t know where you are.” Another nod. She stood up clumsily, again reminding me of myself at her age. She stared at me for another moment before speaking, her voice soft and sweet. 

“They cry a lot,” she said, causing me to almost fall backwards in surprise. “Well, um, adults do that too, sometimes. If you see your parents cry, you should give them a hug. I’m sure that’ll make them feel better.” Suddenly, the look in her eyes was not one of a little girl but of someone who had seen things and had some sort of wisdom about the world that the rest of us didn’t. She gave me a melancholy smile before turning away and going up the walkway to the house. I waited for her to be safely behind closed doors before I put my earbuds back in and continued running.

Every day that it rained I went out running, and every day that it rained the little girl was sitting on the sidewalk playing in the puddles. Every time I saw her would go very much like the first; I would convince her to go back inside, and she would share a little piece of information with me. She told me that her parents sleep in her room with her the nights they would cry and that sometimes they forgot to leave enough space for her on the bed. She told me that her house is full of flowers, but that she thought they were plastic because they didn’t have any smell to them. She told me that sometimes her mom would cook too much food and get really sad when she had to throw it out.

Halfway through the summer, I started feeling ill. My body was weighed down with sick fatigue, and my lungs felt like balloons that had been overfilled. It was just a cold, but I didn’t get sick often so all I wanted was to sit on the couch with the blanket my mother had knitted me and a hot bowl of soup and watch Grey’s Anatomy.

It was raining though.

I had begun to feel an odd responsibility for the little girl. Like if I didn’t send her back inside, she would spend hours out in the cold rain and catch the same cold I was suffering from. So, despite every fiber of my being telling me to stay inside and binge the rest of season 7, I tied my hair up, grabbed my earbuds, and ventured out into the storm, albeit with much less speed and enthusiasm than was normal for me. I tried to push myself though. I had gotten out of the house late, which sent tremors of anxiety through me. It was only by an hour or so, but that was an hour more that the little girl sat in the rain. 

My muscles burned with lactic acid, and there was a horrible stitch in my side, but I felt like I could breathe once I got to the girl’s street and saw her sitting on the sidewalk the same as always. I smiled as I approached her, not realizing just how worried I had been until it had all been relieved. I wondered what she would tell me, what secret information I would be privy to this time. I took my earbuds out in preparation for it.

The screech of tires joined my footsteps and the patter of rain. I turned around, not as a conscious decision, but as a natural reaction to the noise. There was a car skidding across the wet pavement. It was going too fast, too fast for a residential area where children were known to run about, too fast for the rain that slicked the road, too fast for the brakes to do anything but spin the car like a giant frisbee straight into where the little girl was sitting on the sidewalk playing in the puddles.

A scream ripped from my already sore throat, sending me to my knees in a horrible fit of coughing and sobbing and hyperventilating. Getting to my feet was the hardest thing I had ever attempted to do. My body wasn’t allowing me to perform such an offending action, so I ended up crawling on my hands and knees. Tiny rocks cut into my skin, and it was painful, but I needed to get to her.

I could see the blood. There was so much. There was no way that much blood could fit into someone so tiny. 

I could see her body. There were lumps under her mangled skin where bones were bent at angles they shouldn’t be.

I could see the dent she left in the front fender of the car.

I closed my eyes, having to take a second to orient myself so I could get my phone out to call the police instead of curling up in the wet grass and screaming and losing all the soup I had eaten that day like my body begged me to do.

When I opened them, it was gone. There was no car, no body, no blood. There was no little girl. The only thing out of order in the pocket of residential houses I was in was me, on my knees, trying to understand what I had just seen and what I didn’t see anymore. 

I didn’t know what to do, so despite my better judgement, I went home, and I tried to sleep. I laid in bed for hours, staring at the ceiling and seeing nothing but her face and her smile and her blood and wondering if I was going mad. That was almost all I did until the next week came.

Until it rained again.

I went out early. I ran like I never had before. I didn’t realize I was crying until the salt slipped between my panting lips, contrasting sharply with the rain.

She was there. She was there like she was every time it rained. I fell to my knees in front of her, startling her out of whatever she was staring at in that puddle, and lunged forward with the intention of hugging her to my chest to assure myself that she was really there, that she was really alive. I crashed into the ground, bruising my cheek on the concrete because she wasn’t.

That was the day I realized I saw ghosts.


End file.
